A Salesperson's Secret Guide to Prospecting and

Qualifying Leads on the Web:

17 Google Hacks that will help you qualify prospects sooner, recognize
triggering events, and close deals quicker (that your marketing department
doesn't want you to know about).

Talmadge Boyd
7216 South Brook
Austin, Texas
78736
pi@talmadge.otherinbox.com
www.prospectidentify.com
 Table of Contents

About This Book 3

What Is Prospecting? 4
Why Prospect On The Web? 5
Use '+ Name' To Find Your Prospect Name On Social Sites 6
Use 'site' To Find Prospect Data On One Website 8
Use 'filetype' To Find Whitepapers and PDFs Your Prospect Is Creating 10
Use '#..#” To Find Prospect Information With in A Date Range 12
Use '+' To Find Forums and Blogs In Your Industry 14
Use Quotations To Find Email Addresses 16
Find Local Weather Information In Your Prospect's City 17
Find Your Prospect's Favorite Team's Scores 18
Use 'allintitle' And 'intitle' To Find Prospect Data On Specific Pages 19
Use 'related' To Find Additional Customers 21
Use 'allintext' and 'intext' To Prospect Information On Their Webpage 23
Use 'allinurl' To Find Prospect's Websites 25
Use 'better than' To Find New Prospects 26
Use 'phonebook' To Find Prospect's Phone Numbers 28
For Advanced People Only: Use 'not for public release' To Find More Insider Prospect
Data 29
For Advanced People Only: Combine Terms To Do Prospecting Research 30
More Places To Search For Prospect Information 31
The Ultimate Sales Prospecting Cheat sheet 32
About This Book

Howdy! My name is Talmadge Boyd. Online marketing is my passion and trade. I spend most
of my day figuring out ways to promote companies, people and products on the web. I'll spend
hours nosing over keywords, building links and looking for new technology to do it with. I love
it. I'm also the co-creator of www.prospectidentify.com - but we can get to that later.

So, why am I writing this guide and why is it important to you?

Marketers everywhere are using the web to promote their companies as well as increase their
search rankings. It's good for them and their customers. Businesses get noticed and
consumers can find their products quickly with a mouse click.

It's also great news for salespeople who are in the habit of prospecting for new leads (or are
under the gun to get a new deal quickly).

The internet is overflowing with information about your buyers' triggering events, financial
statements, and qualification criteria.

You just have to know how to find it.

Actually, you have to know how to listen for it. Search is really about listening. Putting a
keyword phrase in Google is like sending a sonar ping out and listening for the response the
web gives you. And in your case, you're listening for the signals that prospects give off when
they're ready to buy. Besides, the best sales people are the best listeners, right?

So put your ears on and grab a seat. I'm going to show you how to search the internet for the
information you need to get more leads, qualify them quickly, and close deals faster.

There's one caveat to all this powerful goodness - prospecting the web can take lots of time.

Not only do you have to remember the special search terms, you have to do it regularly.
That's where tools like www.prospectidentify.com can help you shorten your qualification
process even further. By the end of this guide you'll be a pro at scouring the internet for
relevant data about your customers, but if you'd rather spend your time selling than clicking
through sites, sign up for a free 30 days at www.prospectidentify.com. We'd be glad to help.

In the next couple of sections, I'm going to show you how to use Google and popular social
networking sites to find timely and relevant information about your prospects. These tools will
help you get a head start on the other guys and also give you something to talk about with
your customer when you send an email or pick up the phone.
What Is Prospecting?
The definition of prospecting is pretty simple. And you'll find a definition on just about any
sales related website.

Prospecting is defined as:

1. Any activity or conversation you engage in to position yourself in front of a prospect with
the intention to ...

2. inquire, assess, discover, and educate so that you can ...

3. determine whether there's a fit and a relationship that's worth pursuing, which can then
lead to presenting your product or service in order to earn your prospect’s business.

From: The Complete Idiot's Guide to Cold Calling

© 2004 Keith Rosen
PWW-014-04108

But we're not here to talk about plain old cold calling. Cold calling is great, but the web gives
you total control of what you say and information that's not readily available.
Why Prospect On The Web?
Most sales sites just tell you to get a list and start calling it.

But the world's changed.

People don't pick up the phone anymore and a lot of times they don't answer their email. And
if they do, you better be armed to the teeth with a smile and a closet full of data about what's
important to your prospect.

If you look at the definition above you can easily see why prospecting on the web is so
important. It shortens the time it takes do all of the things listed above to get you doing what
you do best – selling.

Let's look at each point in order.

1) When you do searches on the web you are identifying the people, financial criteria and
triggering event that are important to your customer. With Google you can find, phone
numbers, addresses, and personal information like any special or unique interests that
you customers may have

2) Using Google allows you do any inquiries about pain points upfront and privately
BEFORE you pick up the phone. You can build stacks of research about historical
data, potential industry problems, and personal preferences quickly and easily. I
hesitate to guess, but you use Google already, but never like this.

3) You're looking for a fit between your product and your potential client. Using keywords
to search press releases, and URLs allows you to see the fit so that you go into any
conversation well armed. You'll see triggering events faster and be able to react to
them more quickly than anyone on your team.

4) Finally, using Google gives you an edge over the thousands of other salespeople out
there that you're competing with daily. Understanding this powerful tool puts you light
years ahead of the other guys.

But enough jib jab. Let's get to the good stuff.

Use '+ Name' To Find Your Prospect Name on Social Sites
The '+' is a basic search operator that forces Google to look just for a particular term. You
want to use it when you're looking for terms that it would normally ignore.

So if you're looking for a prospects name or a company name on a popular social network you
want to use something like this:

− LinkedIn + Customer Name

− Face book + Customer Name
− Twitter + Customer Name
− Amazon + Customer Name

More and more companies are using social networks to send out press releases or to
announce important company events. They're creating fan pages on Face book, answering
and asking questions on LinkedIn, or using Twitter to post blog posts.

Plus employees of these companies are writing about what they're doing in their jobs. In
some cases they're updating systems or getting ready to move offices. You can use the '+'
operator to find out about these events.

Let's look at an example. Type your name or a prospects name into Google – either in your
toolbar or at Google.com.

You'll see a result that looks a little like this:

Notice that the first two items in the result list are LinkedIn profiles. That's what you're looking
for. You may find other results that include LinkedIn and the name, but the main priority here
is to get to that prospect's info!

And finally when you click on the link you'll come to the LinkedIn results page where you can
find out more about your prospect.

You can do the exact same thing with Twitter, Face book or Amazon. Though it works better
when you have an actual name, you can try the business name instead.

There are other search operators like “site:” that we'll get to next that will help you when you
have a business name.
Use 'site' To Find Prospect Data on One Website

The 'site:' operator forces Google to only search in one domain. That means if you use it to
search for terms at www.ibm.com you're only going to see results if those words appear on
that site.

This operator has loads of useful applications for salespeople who are trying to get timely and
relevant information about their prospects. What's really nice is that you don't have to go
directly to the site at first to get the information you want – you can let Google do all the heavy
lifting for you.

Try out a search like:

− press site:www.ibm.com
− mzinga twitter.com

This returns results for the press page from IBM.

And it takes you right to what you're looking for:

The 'site:' operator is extremely powerful, because it allows you to search across lots of sites,
not just the website for your prospect's company.

Try these out for size:

z tocquigny site:bizjournals.com

If you take a look at that headline, you can definitely tell that there is something going on over
at the Tocquigny shop. This is a triggering event – and if your service can help them save
money, I bet you'd know what to do.

What we'd just do? Well we told Google to search for the word Tocquiny on the site
www.bizjournals.com. If you're not familiar with the Bizjournals family of websites, you should
be. If you are then you're probably used to your local version.

What's great about this search is that you can look across ALL the bizjournal sites at once.

Let's look at the twitter search. In this example, you can see that the folks at mZinga (or
someone else) made an announcement about their selection of Mzinga.

Businesses are using tools like this to make all kinds of announcements – recent funding,
new locations, changes in management, product releases...

What else can you think of?

Use 'filetype' To Find Whitepapers and PDFs Your Prospect Is
Creating

Have you ever read a whitepaper or ebook? Before you say, “No.” just take a second and
think about what you're doing right now.
Marketers everywhere are doing their dead-level best to produce whitepapers and ebooks to
make their companies look and sound like thought leaders.

The point? There are A LOT of .pdf files out there that your prospects have created to tell the
world about their products and services.

Just to be clear a .pdf is the file extension for Adobe Acrobat and Adobe Reader. It's the
universal format for locking up documents and sending them out to the web. Primarily so that
no one copies them or makes any unauthorized changes. You've seen it a million times.

Salespeople like you benefit from all this communication because you get to see what's going
on or what's important in your prospect's world. It's how they want THEIR customers to see
them.

So how do you find a whitepaper your customers are sending out?

The operator format for finding a pdf (or any other file type) is “business name” filetype: pdf.
This tells Google to look for your prospect's company name within any document that has the
filetype of .pdf.

This is great for finding whitepapers, “About Us” information, or marketing slicks. You can
also find job openings (a great triggering event) in .pdf format.

Let's look at an example:

− IBM filetype: pdf

When you get your results back from Google you'll see something rather unusual.

Every one of the results looks something like this:

Who knows what this link is about, but I bet that if this is in your industry you know exactly
what to do about it.

On the left at the beginning of the subject line you'll see [pdf]. That tells you that you're
looking at a .pdf file. And in case you weren't paying attention you'll see it here:

That tells you that you're on the right track.

When you open the document, be prepared to wait a second, it will take some time to load.
The good news is that you can click on the “View as HTML” link and Google will load it up as
a web page. This makes it a whole lot easier to open, read and copy any information that you
need before you make a phone call.
Use '#..#” To Find Prospect Information With in a Date Range

The date range operator allows you to tell Google that you only want to look at documents
that have shown up on the web between certain year ranges.

To use it, place it at the end of one of your other search terms. Let's use the IBM example
again

− IBM site:prweb.com 2007..2008

In this example, we're telling Google to look for the words 'IBM' only on the site
www.prweb.com between the date ranges of 2007 and 2008.

And you can see the results we get back are within the years that you specify.

The #..# operator works really well on PR sites and blogs where each post has a date
associated with it. You can also use it to find .pdfs that were created within a particular
timeframe:

Returns:
Use '+’ To Find Forums and Blogs in Your Industry
Let's come back to the good old '+' operator. As I mentioned before, you can use the '+'
operator to isolate searches to a couple of keywords.

Have you ever wanted to know what your customers' pain points are? What bugs them every
day and how it impacts their lives? Understanding, people's problems can make you a better
salesperson. A using the web can arm you with loads of information.

Let's say that you're selling a product to Project Managers in the B2B world. In order to find
forums and blog posts about Project Managers you'd use the '+' operator like this:

− forum + project management

− blog + project management

This search phrases returns sites that have the words 'project management' and 'forum'
together in the site.

Once you have these forums and pages, you can use the good old 'site' operator to search
the site for your prospect's name and company.
Use Quotations to Find Email Addresses
Here's a little trick that ABSOLUTELY NO ONE wants you to know about. It's something that I
picked up from some headhunters who spent all of their time on the web trying to find people.

How many times have you had a prospect's name and their company but had no idea what
his or her email address is. Sure, you can try john.smith@companyname.com, but that's just
a shot in the dark.

Why not use Google to find exactly what you're looking for?

Let's say you're trying to find an email address at Morgan Stanley. Type in:

− “@morganstanley.com”

You may have to do a little digging, but you'll find what you're looking for. The first thing you'll
see is the Morgan Stanley website. But as you scroll down you'll start seeing
morganstanley.com highlighted in the search results.

In this case, I found what I was looking for on the second page of my search results.

Notice that you'll see the name “Phil...”. They're trying to hide the email address from you in
the search results because Google and the rest of the world is trying to stop search bots from
steeling email addresses on the web. You're not a bot searching the web, so you'll be able to
get what you need.

When you click on the link, you get the information that you're looking for- the email format.

(I've blacked out Phil's name because we don't want to sic the dogs on the poor guy. I'll leave
that up to you.)
Find Local Weather Information in Your Prospect's City
Let's say that you've got your customer's name, number email address, and you know where
he or she lives.

You might want to know a little something about what's going on in their home town. People of
love to talk about one of two things – the weather or sports.

Let's start with the weather. We'll get to sports in the next section

Before you pick up the phone, get on to Google and check out the weather. Type in:

The very first result you'll see will be the forecast for the Portland area.

BRRRrrr. It's chilly up there, but, hey, it's going to warm up over the next week. I wonder what
your prospect is going to be doing with all that balmy 49 degree rain. Are you in Florida? 85
degrees? Well, that's certainly something to talk about
Find Your Prospect's Favorite Team's Scores
If you're a salesperson and you're reading this guide, I'll bet dollars to donuts that you pay
attention to baseball and football.

Does your potential customer?

If so, why not take a few seconds to check the local scores in their area? Let's take a look at
what the Seattle Seahawks are doing

Just type in the team name and you'll get their most recent results.

Google even gave you a little picture of a football, just in case you didn't know that you were
searching for the NFL.
Use 'allintitle' and 'intitle' To Find Prospect Data on Specific
Pages

The 'allintitle' and 'intitle' operators restrict Google's searches to keywords that show up in the
title of a web page.

What's a title of a web page?

In short, it's the text that shows up at the very top of your web browser. Most folks don't pay
attention to it, but SEO marketers and Google does.

It’s the very first thing that SEO specialists will look at when they're writing a web page. They'll
put keywords there so that they can get a higher rank in Google.

It's also the first thing that Google looks at to see if a page is relevant to your search.

Why would you use this term?

Well, if your prospect is a company that sells flowers in Dallas, Texas, you can use the search
to get really narrow search results. Thus telling you exactly who's in your target zone.

Skeptical? Try it out:

And you'll get this result:

Now, go to their page and what do you see at the top?

And I guarantee you that the only reason that those words are in the title is because an
internet marketer wanted to get to the top of Google.

So how is allintitle different from intitle?

Allintitle tells Google that ALL of your words must appear in the title. The intitle operator only
says that some of your words must appear in the title of the page and the rest of the words
can appear anywhere in the document.
Use 'related' To Find Additional Customers
The 'related' operator tells Google to look for pages that are similar to the one that you're
searching for.

You'd use this operator in one of two situations. First, if you know that you have prospects in a
certain vertical market, but you want to find others (of course you do!). And second, if you're
looking to see what the competition is up to – either yours or your prospect's.

Let's look at the first case and assume that you're trying to sell into software companies that
making pricing software and you've already got a customer called Zilliant.

Type in:

And Google will bring back sites that it thinks are similar to the one that you searched for. You
see, Google likes to keep things in 'neighborhoods'. It crawls over many different sites and
then looks at the links going to those sites, sees that they're coming from relatively the same
type of sites and says, “Yep, these are similar.”

So the result that you'll see is something like this:

The first and third search results are competitors to Zilliant. And that means that they are
probably in your target zone as well. After you have their names, you can use the 'site'
operator to find press releases, names, job openings, or whatever you need to understand the
company better.

You can do the same thing to scope out what your competition is doing as well – see what
product's they're offering or even what nasty things they're saying about your company
Use 'allintext' and 'intext' To Prospect Information on Their
Webpage

These two operators tell Google to only look in the text of the document. It will ignore links,
title tags, and URLs.

This search really saves you time when you're trying to identify whether or on the company is
worth your time. Prospectors like you generally follow a process of scanning a website for
certain words that mean the company does what you need it to do – so that they need what
you're selling.

Going directly to Google allows you to find the words you're looking for without wasting time
scouring the site.

You want to use this operator if you're trying to qualify a prospect's website, and you don't
know whether or not they fit your target criteria

Let's say you sell software to companies that have a human resources team and you know
that you want to speak to their vice president.
This search tells Google to look for the exact phrase “vice president” and also the words
human resources on the site ibm.com

And viola! What do we find, but the person that you're looking for --

Again, 'allintext' says that all the words must appear and 'intext' means that only some of
should come back. The former term is much more narrow. Start with 'intext' first.
Use 'allinurl' To Find Prospect's Websites
The 'allinurl' restricts Google to looking in the URL of a page – that is the domain or the words
between www. and .com.

Now why would you want to look in the URL for keywords? In short, Google does. And any
savvy internet market wants to put keywords in the URL so that they can get super high
search rankings.

What you'll start seeing all over the web is press releases or pdf documents that have the
keywords in the URL.

You'll want to use this term when you're either looking for a site about a particular topic or if
you're looking for a company that performs a particular service.

Let's say you're trying to figure out what the people in the consulting industry are reading – so
that you can send your prospect an article that's important to them.

This looks like a good one in the first seat on the return page: www.consultingmag.com

They've got a nice little section on their home page that has these weeks’ articles – probably
the timeliest information about this particular topic.
Use 'better than' To Find New Prospects
Here's a unique search term that ALMOST NO ONE uses.

In fact this isn't really a Google search term at all. It's a way of searching for information
based on how people communicate.

Ever used a product or service and thought that it was 'better than' another product? Like the
Mac is better than the PC, or Budweiser is better than Miller?

Well, so have an awful lot of other people so much so that they'll say it online.

You'd use this search term if you're doing prospecting or competitive research. Some one out
there has talked about your customer's product and thought it was better than (or worse than)
their competition.

Or they've used your product and thought that it was better or worse than someone else’s.

Let's take a look. Use the phrase

− "better than _keyword_"

So for example. Let's say you work for Cisco and you want to know what people say about
your product.
You'll find loads of information about what people think about your product. In fact, it looks like
a magazine has written about you and Vyatta has a whitepaper out about why they've got you
on the ropes.

There's also a review of Foundry Networks from the employees perspective. If you're trying
to get the inside scoop on a company then looking at these kinds of reviews can tell you an
awful lot about what's going on behind closed doors.

That is, the things your prospects' don't want you to know about.
Use 'phonebook' To Find Prospect's Phone Numbers
Google has quite a few very simple but useful searches that can give you personal data that
you can use every day.

Let's say you've had a lead come in with a person's name, but you don't have a phone
number. You know you want to call them back.

Fire up Google and type in this phrase:

− phonebook 'name' 'city'

Google is kind enough to give you a list of all the names in its directory for that person's
name.

If you want to get really fancy and specific, try out the person's full name. You'll be surprised
how much information is out there.

If they're listed, you can probably find them in the Google phonebook.

You can also try this for company names, though Google seems to have changed the rules
around this.
For Advanced People Only: Use 'not for public release' To Find
More Insider Prospect Data
Here's another term that will help you find the behind the scenes data that your customers,
competitors, the government and your own marketing department probably doesn't want you
to know about.

When you use the terms 'not for public release' you get, you guessed it, documents that have
been flagged as confidential.

Returns:

You'll have to keep playing around with this one. There are lots of things you can find:

− "not for distribution" confidential filetype:pdf

− "not for distribution" confidential, travel, filetype:pdf

This is so hot that I feel a little uncomfortable showing you the results. In any event there is a
lot of data out there that THEY DON'T WANT YOU TO FIND.

So go find it.
For Advanced People Only: Combine Terms to Do Prospecting
Research

Once you get the hang of playing around with search terms you're going to find lots of
interesting things that you can do to get information that the marketing department didn't want
you to find.

Remember the 'filetype' example earlier? Well let's combine that will a few other terms to see
what we come up with.

- directory filetype:xls inurl:ibm

This little phrase tells Google to find an online directory that contains and Excel spreadsheet
on sites that have the letters 'ibm' in the URL.

Do you see what I'm getting at?

Yep, you're going to find Excel spreadsheets that are sitting in IBMs servers.

Let's try it.

Returns:

I'm not even going to open this, but I'm just pointing out that there is information out there that
you can use to dig a little deeper and find the information that the other guys would never
even consider looking for.
More Places to Search for Prospect Information

For Personal Prospect Information

1) www.LinkedIn.com
2) www.Facebook.com
3) www.amazon.com
4) www.twitter.com

For Prospect Financial Information

1) finance.yahoo.com
2) google.yahoo.com

For Prospect Current Business Information

1) www.prweb.com
2) www.prnewswire.com
3) www.bizjournals.com
4) www.businesswire.com

For Current Events and Insider Data about Your Prospects

1) blogsearch.google.com
2) www.glassdoor.com
3) www.digg.com
4) www.stumbleupon.com
The Ultimate Sales Prospecting Cheat sheet
Search What does it do? Type This
+ Name Isolates the terms that you're Linkedin + Name
looking for
site: Looks on one website for your development
keywords site:www.ibm.com
filetype: Looks for any file type that sales filetype:pdf
you're looking for sales filetype:xls
#..# Looks for a date range site:www.bizjournals.com
2007..2008
+ Forum Looks for forums or blogs in project management + forum
your industry sales + blog
“@companyname.com” Looks for an email format @ibm.com
sports scores Find recent scores from your san Francisco 49ers
prospect favorite team
weather Get the weather in your weather Portland
prospect's area
allintitle: and intitle: Find prospect keywords in the intitle:flowers Dallas
title of a web page
related: Find similar prospect's to your related:ibm.com
current ones
allintext: and intext: Find prospect information on human resources
one webpage intext:ibm.com
allinurl: and inurl: Find keywords within a URL inurl:consulting
to identify new prospects
'better than' Find competitors or similar better than Cisco
prospects
phonebook: Find personal and business phonebook: john smith Detroit
contact information
'not for public release' Find insider information about “not for public release” +
a company company name
combined terms Dig even deeper into prospect directory filetype:xls inurl:ibm
information